Peter Debye was born in Maastricht, Netherlands on March 24, 1884. He graduated with Aachen University of Technology in 1905 with a degree in electrical engineering. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Munich in physics in 1908.
Debye did a great deal of ground breaking research on the dipole moments of asymmetric molecules. The SI unit for the magnitude of the dipole moment, the Debye, is named in his honor. He also did research in shielding of plasmas, semiconductors and electrolytes, the Debye shielding. He co-developed the Debye–Hückel equation for calculating activity coefficients that measures the deviations from ideal behavior of a mixture of chemical substances. The Debye function is used in the calculation of heat capacity of a substance.
In 1934 he moved to Berlin, where, succeeding Einstein, to become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (now the Max-Planck-Institut). In 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on "molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases."
In 1940 he moved to the United States to become Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. In 1946 he became an American citizen. He retired from teaching 1952, but continued doing research until his death on November 2, 1966.